APC’s reconciliation politics

Samuel Adesanya

3 weeks ago

THE All Progressives Congress (APC) is in the midst of an attempt to reconcile its warring members. It is not clear whether there are many within the party who are desperate to help engender that reconciliation, or whether even given the nature of its formation and beginnings, not to say its malformed ideology, structure and leadership, that reconciliation is possible now or in the future. But what is clear is that as the ungainly reconciliation train of the party began to lumber out of the station, its quarrelsome members have simply carried on regardless of peace moves, and with gusto started fresh fires with the intention of fighting one another to the death.

Much clearer, however, is the fact that the fights, the disunity, the animosities they heartily nursed against one another were totally needless. Apart from the reality that the party was not really a party in structure and ideology when it won high office in 2015, its major problems were triggered by party leaders, particularly the president whose credulous approach to party politics and party organisation was certain to foster internal conflict and weaken cohesion. Combined with the hijack of the presidency by an apolitical group of fierce technocrats and opinion leaders destitute of the transcending and inclusive ideology of the party’s founding, disunity was writ large on the party’s mind and workings.

But somehow, the president has seemed persuaded that once he could saddle the party’s national leader, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, with the arduous task of reconciling the party’s warring states and interest groups, a form of tenuous unity, which is all they think they need, could be sustained through the election period to produce victory, even if it had to be by the skin of their teeth. Asiwaju Tinubu has since put his shoulder to the wheel, anxious to cobble together the unity the party needs to triumph in the next polls. His enthusiasm is infectious, but whether it can produce the results party leaders hope is another thing entirely. For not only have the divisions within the party ossified, many warring party leaders seem to revel in the discord, and are delighted to strew the peacemakers’ path with red herrings.

Far more importantly, the party has not appeared to convince well-wishers and patriots that it understands the foundation of the crisis confronting them. There may be discord in Kaduna of such severity and virulence that no medicine can cure, and in Kogi of such jejuneness and triviality that any serious peacemaker is bound to be mocked, but really, the party’s problem can be located squarely in the presidency where, unfortunately, no anodyne can penetrate. The fractiousness and factionalism in the states and among widely dispersed and competing party functionaries are at bottom a product of the nervous breakdown and ideological stasis in the presidency. The manifestations in the states are merely symptomatic of the problem in the presidency. Heal the presidency (the mind), and the divisions (in the body) will be healed.

It speaks to Asiwaju Tinubu’s large-heartedness and perhaps consummate love for politics that he has accepted the onerous task of reconciling a party which shoved him aside immediately after the elections were won. The urgent task that faced the party in 2015 after their victory was how to build a party out of the disparate groups that combined to snatch victory from the feeble hands of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Rather than acknowledge that responsibility, a task the presidency was best suited to organise and lead because of Nigeria’s peculiar political culture, a group of individuals without a pan-Nigerian vision, or even political reach and mandate, simply stepped in and took the diadem. Thereupon, the group embarked on the most convulsive and fratricidal scheming imaginable, one that immediately tore the party apart and created a vacuum which many ambitious individuals and groups have struggled to fill.

In 2015, the presidency was expected, in consonance with leading party apparatchiks, to firm up the party’s ideology and structure, and prepare itself for governance. Instead a few people aggressively consolidated their private hold on the levers of power and the party. The presidency was expected to assemble a pan-Nigerian group of theorists, technocrats and pragmatic leaders to design a suitable and functional foundation for Nigeria in the 21st Century. Instead, it unwittingly created a festering environment that has pushed the country back to its atavistic past. It was expected to boldly and intelligently tackle the cancer of corruption and institute the rule of law in such a manner that Nigeria would inspire the continent and make the black man proud. Instead, it has enthroned the rule of man, constricted the war against corruption, and exhumed primordial instincts to the point that few now hold out any hope in their Nigerianness. It is this malaise that has trickled down to the states, encouraged tin-pot messiahs everywhere, caused disaffection in the party at national and local levels, and emboldened many party leaders to adopt strong-arm tactics of governance and political exclusion. (See box). To tackle these divisions, the source of the problem must be healed. Yet, there is no indication, nor has Asiwaju Tinubu suggested it to the press, that that primary healing would be undertaken first before the secondary healing is embarked upon.

Late last year, when it became obvious that President Muhammadu Buhari would be seeking a second term, and he seemed suddenly and uncharacteristically amenable to advice from outside his immediate circle, a consensus appeared to have developed to encourage him to rejig his cabinet, purge his inner circle of ethnocentric advisers, return the country’s security infrastructure to its former state of real inclusiveness, firmly and justly tackle the herdsmen crisis, and though he seemed incapable of it, speak warmly and empathetically to grieving citizens about their rights and obligations, and then propose a soaring and visionary ideal for a new Nigeria where neither tribe nor religion mattered. Unfortunately, no steps were taken in these salutary directions, and the presidency seemed to have sunk deeper into unreflective and unproductive conservatism.

If healing does not begin at the presidency, a healing that will restore the real and functioning APC men in the saddle of power and politics, it is hard to see healing taking place in the states and local levels. Indeed, the wound has been left to fester for far too long that, rather than hope to recreate a united APC for the sake of winning the 2019 polls, all the party’s leaders can hope for is that neither the PDP nor any newfangled political organisation organised and inspired by ex-presidents can present a credible alternative. Without a credible alternative, without anyone of some stature and gravitas showing up on the opposing side, even if unreal and affected, the APC will hope that its standard-bearer — obviously the president — will coast home to victory, regardless of the portents of that victory and its potentially harmful impact on the future and stability of the country.

The APC is right to pursue reconciliation. But it has a responsibility to first identify the source of its troubles in order to chart a sensible and lasting solution out of its self-induced morass. The party has been lucky so far that the main opposition party, the PDP, is blithely unable to find its feet after its bad loss in 2015. But that lack of credible and inspiring opposition has lulled the ruling party to sleep, overconfidence and inexcusable arrogance. If the APC is not to be shocked a few months down the line, it should quit taking the country for granted. It has been told what needs to be done at the presidency, and how deeply irreconcilable its disaffected party men are. It should urgently and persuasively commit itself to the change it independently coined as its moniker. Above all, it simply must genuinely convince the country, which has endured the party’s lack of discipline and focus for about three years, that it is capable of imbuing the nation with a restructured political future that conduces to peace, progress and stability.

What the party seems obsessed with and committed to, however, are how it can coax a tentative unity without restructuring their party and running an inclusive APC, and how it can win the next polls without a sustaining and coherent ideology, visionary programmes, and adequate plans to tackle the complexities and challenges of the future. After snatching victory from the jaws of defeat in 2015, they will hope to pull off the rare marvel of making lightning to strike the same place twice in 2019 without attempting a fundamental change to their orthodoxies or getting the presidency to acknowledge and receive absolution for its blame in predisposing the party to discord. By going ahead to entrust redemptive powers to others, it remains to be seen just how far the APC can go in the next few months in the face of abundant proof that its actions are spurred by electoral desperation.